By Sundra Flansburg
I continue to be powerfully impacted with the way that violence surpasses individual tragedies and horrors to become a part of every girl and woman's psyche. Violence and the fear of it is a fundamental difference in the way that women and men experience their daily life, wherever they live. Those of us lucky enough to escape blows and violations still know women who haven't. Those of us who have directly experienced physical or psychological violence are rarely able to just move on. We either don't go outside after dark, coerce others to accompany us or keep our antennae up.
What we feel is more than psychological wounds, it is a rent in the fabric of our human ecology. Violence is in some terrible way part of the collective experience of women. We don't have to directly experience it to fear it, and this fear controls our movements, actions and even thoughts.
Sundra Flansburg currently manages the Work of Women association at World Neighbors, an international development organization that supports the transformation of communities by helping people address hunger, poverty, disease and other challenges that undermine their livelihood, and by inspiring lasting leadership and collective action for change. She has led projects and initiatives on gender equity and development for 20 years.How do you begin to change something like that?
I recently viewed an online documentary entitled Sasa: A Film about Women, Violence and HIV/AIDS by director Chanda Chevanne, and was reminded of the large role that isolation and marginalization play in fear and the acceptance of violence. As Mama Joyce confides in Sasa, "When I compared it to what was happening to other women around me who were beaten, I thought it was the normal way for men to behave. I was ready to apologize so he would forgive me. Even if I didn't make a mistake, I thought it was better to submit to him." She goes on to explain how as she began to internalize this message she lost more and more of her self-worth. She also shares the impact that her husband's belittling and derision had on her. "I found that he was degrading me all the time. I don't know. It's better to be beaten. But even being beaten is hard."
If violence is what women know, and it is only through men that they have access to earnings and information, Mama Joyce's reaction is entirely understandable. She had no one to confirm her instincts that this violence was wrong, that she deserved respect and care. She had already absorbed the message that violence was a legitimate response on the part of her husband to "mistakes" she made. The fear of further violence shut her down. This situation, however, can be changed.
At World Neighbors, we partner with rural communities that are isolated and marginalized, struggling to get by. There are also groups within these communities that are marginalized, and in the early stages of our partnership women are almost always one of those groups. Their health is generally poor, they get less to eat than the men they live with, their workdays are longer, they have little or no access to money or other resources, and they don't participate in community meetings, much less decision making. And violence against women, usually by domestic partners or family members, is common.
In rural settings with small communities, where everyone knows each other and depends on everyone else, some of the approaches that work in urban settings or richer countries aren't appropriate. Because World Neighbors works to ensure that communities become empowered and learn how to access and maintain the resources that enable them to manage their own development, community cohesion and cooperation are important. Ensuring that our work directly and significantly addresses critical needs is vital.
One of the first things World Neighbors does to begin breaking down the isolation that protects violence is by supporting spaces for women to be heard. Women's groups are almost always related to savings and credit initiatives, but can be any woman only space. With this connection to other women, and the validation of their experiences and opinions, women talk about finding their voices again. The focus on earning income helps them address a basic need while at the same time to participate in a process that addresses bigger issues. Our work in other aspects of community life help the whole community begin to link their urgent needs to gender equity. Because discussions focus on urgent needs, villagers begin to see how including different perspectives provides for a fuller understanding of village needs. They also understand how poor gender relations and exclusion of women in decision making leads to wasting scarce resources.
Often, when women have the opportunity to get together and begin to share experiences, the issue of violence will spontaneous arise. In a number of cases with World Neighbors groups, the women collectively determine strategies for preventing and dealing with violence. Examples of these actions have included collectively protesting a community liquor store until it shut down, and creating norms for a community organization that prohibit members from assaulting one another.
In the Philippines, in the thin-walled huts families have in some of the communities World Neighbors works in, family violence is no secret. But what ears knew for the truth, mouths did not speak; that is, not until their women's savings and credit group decided that this situation was not right. Group members agreed that whenever someone heard a beating or aggression happening, they would grab their cooking pot and a wooden spoon and head for the house where the violence was occurring - along with the rest of the group members. They banged their pots loudly, shouting at the man to stop hurting his wife. They managed to turn around the shame they originally felt at being beaten to shaming the aggressors.
Will banging pots end violence or impunity with regards to it? No. But dragging violence out from the shadows and into the public light is at least part of the answer - doing it together is essential. The inspiring and powerful work described by the rest of the writers in this blog series provides some of the other pieces. It will surely take all of us, and more.
